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The author of eight novels, two short story collections and two essay collections, Chabon is best known for "Wonder Boys," which was made into a movie starring Michael Douglas and Tobey Maguire, and "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay," which won a 2001 Pulitzer Prize.

Chabon's latest book, "Telegraph Avenue," is an ornately plotted tale set in Northern California during the summer of 2004.

The action spins off two men who own Brokeland Records, a veritable shrine to vinyl that's languishing in "the ragged fault where the urban plates of Berkeley and Oakland subducted." When the fifth-richest black man in America threatens to build a megastore nearby with a vintage album collection as deep as Brokeland's - this is the era just before the digital music boom - Archy and Nat must act.

Chabon (pronounced SHAY-bon) will appear at the Alley Theatre on Monday to read from "Telegraph Avenue" and discuss his other writing projects. Tickets to his appearance, made possible by local literary nonprofit Inprint, are sold out.

Q: So much of the liveliness of "Telegraph Avenue" comes from the characters' enthusiasm for very specific slices of pop culture, including Quentin Tarantino, blaxploitation films, a range of jazz music and comic books. Is this a way for you to write about your own passions or is there endless research involved?

A: It's really both. I often will choose to write a particular novel because I know the milieu of the book will give me the excuse to explore certain ideas and aspects of history or pop culture or just culture generally. It only makes sense to start with something that you know already and are fascinated by. Because down the line, several years into a project, that fascination will be put to the test.

Q: Your main characters in "Telegraph Avenue," Archy and Nat, are best friends. Archy is black and Nat is white. Was it difficult or intimidating as a white writer to steep yourself in black culture, to get to a point where you felt you'd gotten it right?

A: It's always hard to put yourself into another's person's life or consciousness. It takes effort. It takes imagination. And empathy. Those are all qualities that are not only fundamental parts of a writer's tool kit, but they ought to be a fundamental part of a human being's tool kit. … But in the case of writing fiction, the character is someone who has been shaped by you from the get-go, and that helps. That shortens the distance. I just trusted in my having paid attention to people for all my life and hoped that when combined with a willingness to inform and educate myself that I'd be able to do a decent job and honor my characters.

Q: In some ways, "Telegraph Avenue" is a book about nostalgia. In an early scene at a card show, a character named Mr. Nostalgia reflects on the inherent value of the items he sells, which include "Dune" trading cards and "Mork & Mindy" and "Gentle Ben" board games: "They were worth only what you would pay for them; what small piece of everything you had ever lost that, you might come to believe, they would restore to you." What is it about objects from the past that can be so jolting?

A: The feeling of nostalgia -the emotion - is not in a dusty box of cards. It's in the person who picks up one of those cards and, at the sight of it, is suffused with a perfect but very fleeting resurrected moment from his or her past.

That burst of perfect recollection is kind of addictive. And sometimes, you can get an overwhelming physical rush about something that predates you. An ad from a magazine in the 1940s, or a sign on the side of a building. That's remarkable when you can get that same kind of feeling. It's so personal. It's much more akin to a kind of emotional time travel.

Q: Your writing isn't limited to novels. Your screen-writing credits include "Spider-Man II" and "John Carter." Are you working on any film or television projects at the moment?

A: My wife [writer Ayelet Waldman] and I have a television series we've been working to develop for HBO. That project is called "Hobgoblin." We're waiting now, having written two scripts - for the pilot and the second episode - for HBO to determine its fate. It's a World War II story that would be a series about a disgraced British intelligence officer who attempts to redeem himself by assembling a secret team of various kinds of performing charlatans - an escape artist, a con artist, a spirit medium - to perpetrate deceptions against the Germans.

Q: What's the biggest difference between writing a novel and a screenplay?

A: In a screenplay, you have so much less room to operate. You have to make things happen much more quickly. A screenplay is so tight, a 120-page barrier, and the page counts are getting even shorter. Operating in that tight framework with such a strict upper limit forces you to make dialogue choices you don't have to confront in a novel.